$3.3-billion contract for Coast Guard ships will bring up to 1,000 jobs to Vancouver Shipyards

Workers are seen at the Vancouver Shipyard in North Vancouver, B.C. Monday, Oct. 7, 2013. The Federal Government announced Monday that the Vancouver Shipyard will be building up to 10 additional large non-combat ships for the Canadian Coast Guard.

Photograph by: Jonathan Hayward
, THE CANADIAN PRESS

METRO VANCOUVER - A $3.3-billion federal contract awarded to Vancouver Shipyards Monday will have as many as 1,000 skilled workers rushing to fill an order for ten new non-combat ships for the Canadian Coast Guard.

The project is in addition to seven non-combat vessels that the company is already slated to build after it was awarded an $8-billion deal by the federal shipbuilding procurement project in 2011. Work is yet to start on any of those vessels.

The deal is expected to create numerous jobs in the skilled trades — at wages of more than $40 an hour — including welding, pipe fitting, electrical and mechanical.

Brian Carter, president of Seaspan Shipyards, said the company is spending $185 million to modernize its North Vancouver shipyard, located midway between the Lions Gate Bridge and Lonsdale Quay, to accommodate the new orders.

“The announcement today is exciting for us because it adds up to 10 additional vessels to our backlog of seven so we can build up to 17 vessels,” Carter said Monday.

The 10 additional vessels include up to five so-called medium-endurance vessels that will be used for various coast guard programs such as the deployment and recovery of navigational buoys. Up to another five offshore patrol ships will also be built for fisheries protection, search and rescue, and environmental response.

Carter said Vancouver Shipyards is still in the planning and design phase for the first batch of vessels that were awarded in 2011. They include a polar icebreaker, slated to be the largest of its kind in Canada’s fleet, an offshore oceanographic science vessel, three offshore fisheries science vessels, and two naval joint support ships.

Construction is scheduled to start on the first ship next October.

“We have two new buildings up and running and four others under construction and a bunch of shipbuilding equipment to support our construction of the first vessel under the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy,” Carter said.

Seaspan Shipyards includes Vancouver Shipyards and Vancouver Drydock in North Vancouver, as well as Victoria Shipyards in Victoria.

He said passengers riding past Vancouver Shipyards on the SeaBus will see an 86-metre-tall, dark-blue gantry crane being installed early next year. It will be capable of moving up to 300 tonnes. What he called a load-out pier is under construction. It’s meant to take the nearly complete vessels from the shipyard and move them to dry dock, where they can be launched.

He said 150 people are now in Vancouver Shipyards’ production workforce. Starting next year, that will increase and reach about 1,000 within three to four years time. At that point, as many as three ships at various stages of completion could be worked on concurrently. According to the Shipyard General Workers Federation, shipbuilders could expect to be paid as much as $47 an hour.

Federal Public Works Minister Diane Finley, who announced the 10 new ships at the North Vancouver shipyard on Monday, called its now $38-billion procurement project an “unprecedented investment” by the government.

She said the project will see the Canadian shipping industry generate $2 billion a year in economic benefits for Canadians.

“By economic benefits, what I really mean is good, skilled jobs, and even better ... it is at last bringing some long-term stability to this industry,” she told a crowd gathered at the Seaspan’s North Vancouver’s shipyard.

“Those boom-and-bust cycles that have long plagued the Canadian shipbuilding industry are already becoming a thing of the past.”

Finley added that the industry is expected to generate more than 15,000 jobs over the next 30 years, including jobs in steel manufacturing, information technology and defence systems.

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Workers are seen at the Vancouver Shipyard in North Vancouver, B.C. Monday, Oct. 7, 2013. The Federal Government announced Monday that the Vancouver Shipyard will be building up to 10 additional large non-combat ships for the Canadian Coast Guard.

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